Users unfamiliar with the IRS tax code or what itemized deductions may be claimed often tend to lose the tax advantages of legitimate deductions. Conventional electronic tax return preparation software applications cluster a business with the NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes or even the older SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes and often fail to provide relevant or correct recommendations for itemized deductions to users. Such codes often categorize some businesses that are tangentially related at best. As a result, any cluster results based on such codes are marginally useful at best.
Some conventional approaches rely on user provided transaction information to categorize user's transactions into expense categories that may not be reported in the tax return if the user lacks such knowledge. Moreover, even experienced users may not be familiar with the chances of IRS audit associated with certain user entries. In addition, the amounts of deductions are generally entered manually and are thus susceptible to human errors. Conventional approaches often checks for anomalies or errors based solely upon the numeric amounts entered by a user in comparison with some average of similar users but fail to consider any user specific information in such checks.
Therefore, there exists a need for a method, system, and computer program product for providing tax return information for an electronic tax return preparation and filing software application delivery model to address at least the aforementioned shortcomings of conventional approaches.